Huawei announces new chip design method amid US sanctions

Huawei has announced a new approach to semiconductor development that the company says will allow it to produce advanced chips despite United States sanctions that have blocked its access to cutting-edge manufacturing equipment. The announcement was made Monday by He Tingbo, president of Huawei’s semiconductor business, during a keynote address at the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems in Shanghai.

He introduced a principle the company calls the Tau Scaling Law, which shifts the focus of chip design from shrinking transistors to speeding up data transmission across devices, circuits, chips and computing systems. For decades, the semiconductor industry has followed Moore’s Law, the observation that the number of transistors on a chip doubles roughly every two years, leading to faster and more efficient processors. As physical limits make further miniaturization increasingly difficult, the industry has been searching for new ways to improve performance.

Huawei said its team has spent the past six years applying the Tau Scaling Law and has mass produced 381 chips based on the approach. The company also said its next Kirin chip, set to launch this autumn, will be...